The Magic of Maywood Park

Remembering the year Rudy Chapa, Carey Pinkowski and Tim Keough all broke 9:00 in the 2-mile run.

In the spring of 1975, something magical occurred in Hammond, Ind.Four young men did something that had never been done before, and hasn't been repeated since. Hammond High School runners Rudy Chapa, Tim Keough and Carey Pinkowski, led by their 20-something coach, Dan Candiano, became the only high school runners from the same school in the same year to break 9:00 for 2 miles. It wasn't planned. It hadn't been a specific goal for any of the trio or their coach. It just happened.

Pinkowski did it first, running a solo 8:56.2 on what Keough described as a "horrible," cold, windy day. Pinkowski was on his own because the team's two stars, he and Chapa, never raced each other on the track. In cross country the pair had intentionally tied for first in the Indiana state championships. Candiano devised the plan to preserve his top runners so they could always earn maximum points for the team, as distance runners weren't allowed to run multiple events in 1975. A few days after Pinkowski broke 9:00, Chapa and Keough had their chance. They rose to the challenge, running 8:52.6 (Chapa) and 8:52.8 (Keough).

At that moment the Hammond Trio had the first-, second-and fourth-fastest times in the country for 2 miles. To put the accomplishment in perspective, in 1975 only five other high school runners broke 9:00 in the 2-mile run, out of more than a million attempts at the distance, according to data compiled by noted track statistician Jack Shepard. Shepard's data show that only three times since have two runners from the same school accomplished the feat, and all of them are sets of twins--Chuck and Frank Assumma in 1977, Mark and Eric Mastalir in 1986, and Joe and Jim Rosa in 2010. The Assummas and Mastalirs were out of California; the kids who broke 9:00 were often from warm-weather states on the West Coast. But it was a farm boy from neighboring Illinois who served as an inspiration for the trio: Craig Virgin, who broke Oregonian Steve Prefontaine's national outdoor high school record with an 8:40.9 2-mile in 1973.

"It wasn't Prefontaine or Shorter or any of those guys that were as much of an influence," says Keough. "Virgin was one of us. He was our age. He was from the Midwest . Somebody we could relate to."

While it was no surprise that Pinkowski, a senior, and junior Chapa would run that fast, Keough was the shocker. As a senior, the former football player, former wrestler, former pole vaulter dropped his PR in the event from 9:40 to 9:25 to 8:52. And if it wasn't for the near body block put on Keough by a lapped runner down the final straightaway, Keough, not Chapa, might have won their duel. "I was warming up for the half," says Pinkowski, "and I took a look at the race and saw what was happening. I thought, 'Boy, Rudy must be having a bad day, Tim's right on his butt.' He was coming on Rudy really fast when the [lapped runner] got in his way. [Keough] ran right into his back and pretty much stopped dead before he got going again, and he ended up only two-tenths of a second behind Rudy."

"Rudy said that he still had a lot left and would have been able to hold me off," says Keough, chuckling. "But I was closing real fast, and I don't think he thought I was coming or would have had time to react." What made it even more surprising was that Keough's fastest quarter mile was only 57 seconds, while both Chapa and Pinkowski had run 5 to 6 seconds faster. "I just didn't have much speed," Keough says.

Keough's ambition had not been to challenge his more accomplished teammates. His goal had been to letter in a sport. His football career ended when he developed an inflammatory bone disease, Osgood-Schlatter. Not to be deterred, he tried out for the wrestling team, where he had the ambition, but not the skill.

"My coach took my mother aside one day after church," Keough recalls. He told her that while he liked Keough and respected his ambition, he didn't think he would make the varsity in the sport. Twice denied, Keough didn't give up. He became a pole vaulter on the track team.

"The highest I got was 10-3," says Keough with a laugh. But he noticed that he could hold his own in running. He seemed to have some aptitude for it: for the hard work, the dedication, the discipline that Candiano preached to his athletes was necessary for success. Keough was too slow to be a sprinter and didn't have the pure finishing speed to be a middle-distance runner, so, with his Osgood-Schlatter disease in remission, Keough became a distance runner.

For Chapa and Pinkowski, the route to the track and cross country team wasn't as circuitous. Pinkowski played several sports--the high-profile football and basketball among them. Chapa wrestled and played baseball. "We were all good athletes," says Pinkowski. "We could do other things besides running." They had other options for the all-important letter jacket and symbols of athletic success, but they could also see that they were destined to be role players on team sports. For some that's enough. Keough, for one, would have been comfortable in the cocoon of a team sport, but there was that rebel element in the trio, says Pinkowski, that drew them to running.

The now iconic Sports Illustrated photo of the three displays them in their white and purple Wildcat sweatsuits with scruffy faces and long hair. They look like a rock band, not three of the best high school distance runners in the U.S. Pinkowski is wearing a golf visor, reminiscent of 1972 800m gold medalist Dave Wottle's famous golf cap, another symbol of individuality and self-confidence, some would say cockiness.

Chapa is often described as "humble" or "quiet," who led by example, while Keough came from an Irish/Catholic family of 10 kids and was satisfied to be part of the team. Pinkowski had the flashy car and the outgoing personality. He was the leader, but each of the three was fiercely competitive and liked nothing better than to demonstrate he deserved to be on top.

Charged with directing, disciplining and developing all these raging teenage hormones, ambitions and talent was Candiano, a Gary, Ind., native and recent graduate of DePaul

University who was a rebel in his own way. Candiano had potential as a middle-distance runner. He still has the school record at DePaul for the outdoor mile at 4:09, set in 1970. Candiano's talent went undeveloped, however, as he recalls with a great sense of frustration. "They would send the team manager for the basketball team everywhere with the team, but I couldn't even go to nationals because they said they didn't have enough money in the budget."

So instead of developing his distance running, Candiano focused on getting his education degree and launching a professional career. He had found a teaching job at another school in Indiana when he graduated from DePaul in 1971, but just before the school year started he saw an ad for a position at Hammond High, which was looking for a cross country and track coach. He jumped at it. He was determined to provide for the kids he coached the opportunities he never had, but it wasn't easy.

There was no junior high track or running program, no feeder system, so Candiano had to recruit. Candiano spotted Pinkowski, a student in his English class, and convinced him to try running. Pinkowski remembers breaking the news to his dad. "We were at the dinner table and I said, 'Dad, I'm going to go out for cross country.' 'What is that?' he says. 'It's running.' 'Have you told the football coach yet?'"

Candiano's recruiting didn't stop with the students. He knew he had to sell the parents as well. "If these kids follow my program and stay healthy, they'll be able to get a college scholarship," he told them. Then he'd get the parents onboard in helping to make sure the kids weren't too distracted, telling them it was important the kids got enough rest, a good diet, and stuck to their training program. Not just any training program, but an ambitious, some might say overly ambitious routine.

From his own experience, Candiano believed that mileage was the secret to improvement. When he had run more, he had run faster, so his team was tasked with a regimen of more than 100 miles a week, training every day, most often two workouts a day. They'd be up at 5:30 a.m., and if they weren't, Candiano would find out why. Alberto Salazar, who counts Chapa as his closest friend, laughs as he recalls Rudy telling him that if he wasn't at practice in the morning, Candiano would come to the house, walk up to Chapa's bedroom and bang on the door.

"Typical Latin family," Salazar says. "Oh, he needs to be at the workout. OK, coach, go get him."

"I'm a morning person anyway," says Chapa. "But the discipline I got from having to get up for those workouts is still with me today."

Candiano's training program wasn't a one-size-fits-all, sink-or-swim approach, however. He knew he had to adapt his formula to fit the athletes. Chapa, he notes, could handle just about anything Candiano threw at him. His toughness was legendary. Toes hurt, Chapa just cut off the front tops of his running shoes and kept going. Pinkowski was more fragile, says Candiano. Keough never ceased to surprise. While he seemingly didn't have the raw talent of his two teammates, he didn't back down. He kept challenging them, kept improving.

The trio still debate with Candiano over his distance-oriented program. They believe he should have given them more speed work. He maintains that the key to their success was the strength-building mileage, the emphasis on distance, and the soft ground they ran on in their daily workouts circling Maywood Park. Hammond High had no track, so their track became the three-quarter-mile square park.

Instead of a typical U.S. program that mixed long runs on the roads with interval training on the track, Candiano's program had a flavor to it similar to how Kenyans train on the red clay roads of their native country. Even on the long morning runs the pace always varied, and the intensity of the sessions was dictated by the innate competitiveness of the participants. In other words, gather together a group of talented, competitive runners and give them a training program built around long intervals, mixed pace, and endurance, keep them healthy and watch the cream rise to the top.

"We had some of our hardest races in 'races' in Maywood Park," says Pinkowski. "We did a lot of speed play, fartlek in the morning. Long intervals in the evening--one-lappers, two-lappers. Long run was a 10-lapper hard on Friday afternoon." But Candiano knew that all that hard work had to be supported by elements other than just competitiveness.

"I knew that to get these guys to do what I was asking them to do, there had to be some recognition," says Candiano. He had assemblies at the school, just like the traditional pep rallies for the basketball or football team. He hung signs over the locker room and in the halls of the school touting the accomplishments of the athletes. He made them rock stars at a time and place where runners often didn't get much notice or attention.

While this helped his athletes, it didn't make him popular with others at the school. Candiano recalls being approached by the football coach, who was also the school's athletic director, who said that he was annoyed that Candiano had more kids out for his teams than he did for his. One can be too successful a recruiter, apparently. The uphill battles took their toll on Candiano. "I was burnt out," he says of his leaving Hammond after Chapa had graduated. He moved to the private sector, working for himself as a contractor and in real estate.

"I have personally built and closed over 100 condominiums in Northwest Indiana during the past 20 years," says Candiano. "During the past four years I have purchased, rehabbed and rented numerous houses in Gary, Ind., in the same neighborhood where I was raised."

He didn't abandon track and field. He served two stints as an athletic director at other schools, where he was determined to follow his philosophy that the so-called minor sports, such as track and cross country, got the same support in the school as the majors, and still did some coaching. "When I moved over to Bloom Trail High School, I assisted the head track coach while I was the AD for a two-year period," says Candiano. "I trained two of our distance runners using the same training methods I'd used at Hammond. Chris Heldt finished third in the 3200 with a 9:14:2 and Joe Blackstone ran a 9:18 the same year. I am convinced that both young men would have run under 9:00 with the same four years of training that Rudy had undergone." (Chapa was the only member of the trio who Candiano coached for all four years of high school.)

Candiano has faced the good times and bad with the same philosophy that he attempted to teach his runners: Life is hard and you have to overcome obstacles. His own life and that of his stars reflect that.

Keough went to Arizona State, where he broke a metatarsal bone in his foot his first year. While many would have packed it in, Keough came back home, worked in the steel mills until the foot recovered and then returned to Arizona to finish college.

The broken foot, however, never really healed. He stopped running after college, except for occasional returns to run a race. Biking is now his sport and transportation of choice. He works for Schreiber Foods, a cheese-processing company with a plant in Tempe, Ariz., often biking to work, and does a Christmas season gig as a Santa Claus, complete with natural flowing white hair and beard.

Chapa and Pinkowski also had their running careers cut short by injury. Chapa went to Oregon, helped lead the team to win the 1977 NCAA cross country team championship, and was the NCAA 5,000m track champion in 1978. During the NCAA track championships in his junior year, he and Salazar were in the stadium walking through a tunnel when Chapa stepped wrong on an uneven surface. "The noise sounded like a gun had gone off," Salazar remembers. "Rudy's ankle swelled up like a grapefruit." They got ice on it and treatment and Chapa still ran the 5K on what was only one good leg. Villanova's Sydney Maree, a teammate of Pinkowski's, ran a 52-second last lap to win that race. Chapa ran 56 and was second, but he never fully recovered from the injury that had damaged tendons, ligaments and muscle in his ankle.

Chapa's college coach, Bill Dellinger, smiles when Chapa's name is mentioned. "He's Bill's favorite," says Dellinger's wife, Marol. "He says that Rudy was one of his most talented athletes he's coached, right behind Pre."

A picture of the 1977 Oregon NCAA champion cross country team hangs on the wall in Dellinger's house. One day, the Dellingers got a call from Chapa. "He said, 'Coach I never really thanked you for all you did for me,'" Marol says. "I want to do something for you." He told them to pick a place to visit anywhere in the world and that he would pay for the trip. Health conditions prevented a more exotic trip, so the Dellingers chose Las Vegas for a reunion of the 1977 team, all expenses paid by Chapa.

Salazar was one of the runners at that reunion. "Phil Knight told me that Rudy was the hardest-working person at Nike," says Salazar, who watched Chapa rise to a senior vice president post at the company. "And that's saying something, but it was true. Rudy only got a few hours sleep a night, was up at 4:30 every morning."

For Pinkowski it was no single injury, just a litany of little ones that caused him to give up a career in running to organize events for those who still want to test their limits. At Villanova, he barely missed breaking 4:00 in the mile with a PR of 4:00.8. He was part of several conference and NCAA championship teams, but he learned about more than running, taking away other lessons from his legendary coach, Jumbo Elliott. "Jumbo's philosophy was that life wasn't just about athletics but that we should enjoy the school atmosphere, the friends we make, and the people we meet, because when you finish with school your life will change dramatically," Pinkowski recalls.

Pinkowski spent some time as a post-collegiate runner with Athletics West, but ultimately returned to the Midwest to perform a rescue operation on what is now the Bank of America Chicago Marathon. The race was on life support at the time he got involved; Pinkowski and his team restored Chicago to premier status in the world of marathon running. He even has a portion of the street where the race starts in Grant Park named after him. Most of the questions he gets from runners today concern his events rather than what he did in high school, but when he goes out to talk to high school teams, the topic still comes up.

"Coach Candiano told us if we worked hard, stayed healthy and followed the program people would still be talking about what we did 10 years later," says Pinkowski. It may be one of the few times Candiano undersold his message.

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